Systems models

Davinia Hernández-Leo

Aplicaciones Telemáticas (Unit 2)

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 Use of descriptive models

• Physical models
– Hardware composition in terms of computers and
their interconnecting networks

• Architectural models
– The architecture of a system is its structure in terms
of separately specified components and their
interrelationships

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 Physical models

• Baseline physical model: distributed system as

an extensible set of computer nodes interconnected
by a computer network for the required passing of
messages

• Beyond this baseline model, we can usefully identify

three generations of distributed systems
– Early distributed systems Nodes were typically desktop
computers and therefore
relatively static, discrete and
– Internet-scale distributed systems autonomous.

Emergence of mobile,
– Contemporary distributed systems ubiquitous and cloud computing.
Great heterogeneity.

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 Physical models

• An example

intranet
☎
☎
☎ ISP

backbone

satellite link

desktop computer:
server:
network link:

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 Architectural models

• Three-stage approach:
– Core underlying architectural elements
– Composite architectural patterns
– Middleware platforms

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements

• To understand the fundamental building blocks

of a distributed system, it is necessary to
consider four key questions:
– Entities communicating?
– Communication paradigm used?
– Roles and responsibilities?
– Mapping to physical distributed infrastructure?

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Communicating entities

• From a system perspective, the entities that

communicate in a distributed system are typically
processes.
– In some environments, the entities are nodes (sensor
networks)
– In most distributed system environments, processes are
supplemented by threads

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 Architectural models
Processes and execution threads

• Process
– Execution program requiring some resources:
• Space memory locations
• Processor registers
• Open files
• Etc.
– Sequential and independent execution

• Execution thread à SEMINAR 1

– Running program that shares the memory image and
other process resources with other threads
– Its execution can be launched in parallel with another
one

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 Architectural models
Processes and execution threads

• “Threaded program” à Higher potential (performance

increased by executing asynchronous and parallel
code)

• Threads: Independent control flows within the same

process sharing global data (global variables, files, etc.),
but having their own stack, local variables and
program counter
– Light processes (smaller context)
• Need little memory
• Have low creation cost
– Suitable model for exploiting parallelism in a multiprocessor
environment
– Improve operating systems performance by reducing the overhead
caused by the context change between processes
Computer Computer

Processes Threads
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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Communicating entities

• From a programming perspective, processes are

not enough, and more problem-oriented
abstractions have been proposed:
– Objects
– Components
– Web services

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Communicating entities

• Objects
– Object oriented approaches (in design and programming
languages)
– Objects interacting and representing natural units of
decomposition
– Objects are accesed via interfaces with an associated
interface definition language (or IDL).
• IDL provides a specification of the methods defined on an object

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Communicating entities

• Components à SEMINAR 3
– Response to the problems of distributed objects
– Similar to objects (problem-oriented abstraction and
accessed through interfaces)
– Key difference: A more complete contract for system
construction, that is, they specify their interfaces and
makes all dependencies explicit
– Encourages and enables third-party development of
components
– Promotes a purer compositional approach removing
hidden dependencies

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Communicating entities

• Web Services à SEMINAR 4

– Based on objects and components: encapsulation of
behaviour and access through interfaces
– Key difference: Integrated into the World Wide Web,
using web standards to represent and discover services
• W3C defines a web service as:
“a software application identified by a URI, whose interfaces and
bindings are capable of being defined, described and discovered
as XML artefacts. A Web service supports direct interactions with
other software agents using XML-based message exchanges via
Internet-based protocols”
– Complete services crossing organizational boundaries
• Business to business integration

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Communication paradigms

• Three types of communication paradigm:

– Interprocess communication
– Remote invocation
– Indirect communication

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Communication paradigms

• Interprocess communication
– Low-level support for communication between
processes
• Message-passing primitives
• Socket programming à SEMINAR 2
• Multicast communication

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Communication paradigms

• Remote invocation (two-way exchange between

communicating entities, a sender and a receiver)
– Request-reply protocols
• Protocols involving a pairwise exchange of messages from client to
server and then from server back to client
• First message containing an encoding of the operation to be executed
– Remote procedure calls (RPC)
• Procedures in processes on remote computers can be called as if they
are procedures in the local address space
• Offer access and location transparency
– Remote method invocation (RMI)
• A calling object can invoke a method in a remote object
• Ability to pass object identifiers as parameters in remote calls

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Communication paradigms

• Indirect communication
– Group communication:
• Paradigm supporting one-to-many communication
• It relies on the abstraction of a group which is represented in the system by a
group identifier
– Publish-subscribe systems
• Information-dissemination systems wherein a large number of producers (or
publishers) distribute information items of interest (events) to a similarly large
number of consumers (or subscribers)
– Message queues
• Point-to-point service whereby producer processes can send messages to a
specified queue and consumer processes can be notified of the arrival of new
messages in the queue
– Distributed shared memory
• An abstraction for sharing data between processes that do not share physical
memory. Programmers are nevertheless presented with a familiar abstraction
of reading or writing (shared) data structures as if they were in their own local
address spaces, thus presenting a high level of distribution transparency.
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Architectural models
Communicating entities and communication paradigms

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Roles and responsibilities

• In a distributed system, the processes take on

given roles, and these roles are fundamental in
establishing the overall architecture to be adopted
– Client-Server
– Peer-to-Peer

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Roles and responsibilities

• Client-Server
– The most important, often and widely employed
– Servers may in turn be clients of other servers

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Roles and responsibilities

• Peer-to-Peer
– All processes involved in a task or activity play similar role
– All participating processes run the same program and offer the
same set of interfaces to each other
– The resources available to run the service grow with the number of
users

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 Architectural models
Architectural elements – Placement

• Consider how entities such as objects or services

map on to the underlying physical distributed
infrastructure
• Placement is crucial in terms of determining the
properties of the distributed system, most
obviously with regard to performance but also to
other aspects, such as reliability and security
• Placement strategies
– Mapping of services to multiple servers
– Caching
– Mobile code
– Mobile agents

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 Architectural patterns

• Provide composite recurring structures that

have been shown to work well in given
circumstances

• They are not themselves necessarily complete

solutions but rather offer partial insights that,
when combined with other patterns, lead the
designer to a solution for a given problem domain
– Layering
– Tiered architectures

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 Architectural patterns
Layering

• In a layered approach, a complex system is

partitioned into a number of layers, with a
given layer making use of the services offered
by the layer below
– A software abstraction, with higher layers being
unaware of implementation details
– In terms of distributed systems, this equates to a
vertical organization of services into service layers

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 Architectural patterns
Layering

• Software and hardware service layers in

distributed systems
– Platform
• The lowest-level hardware and software layer
• Provide services to the layers above them
• Examples: Intel x86/Windows, Intel x86/Solaris, Intel
x86/Mac OS X
– Middleware
• Layer of software whose purpose is to mask heterogeneity
and to provide a convenient programming model to
application programmers
• Support of abstractions such as remote method invocation;
communication between a group of processes; notification of events; the
partitioning, placement and retrieval of shared data objects amongst
cooperating computers; the replication of shared data objects
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 Architectural patterns
Tiered architecture

• Technique to organize functionality of a

given layer and place this functionality into
appropriate servers and, as a secondary
consideration, on to physical nodes
– Complementary to layering
– Most commonly associated with the organization of
applications and services (but it also applies to all
layers)

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 Architectural patterns
Tiered architecture

• Consider this functional decomposition of a

given application:
– Presentation logic: handling user interaction and
updating the view of the application
– Application logic: detailed application-specific
processing associated with the application (business
logic)
– Data logic: persistent storage of the application,
typically in a database management system

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 Architectural patterns
Tiered architecture

• Two-tier and three-tier architectures

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 Associated middleware solutions

• The task of middleware is to provide a higher-level

programming abstraction for the development of
distributed systems and, through layering, to
abstract over heterogeneity in the underlying
infrastructure to promote interoperability and
portability
– Middleware solutions are based on the architectural
models
– Examples in the next table of categories of middleware
• Modern middleware platforms tend to offer hybrid solutions
• Taxonomy is not intended to be complete in terms of the set of
middleware standards and technologies available today

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Associated middleware solutions
Categories of middleware

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 Case Study – Microservices

• Microservices are an architectural style that structures

an application as a collection of services that are
– Highly maintainable and testable
– Loosely coupled
– Independently deployable
– Organized around business capabilities
– Owned by a small team

– An approach of developing a suite of small services working as a single

application

• Read this article: Microservices

(https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html)
– During the class session we will carry out a short questionnaire
with questions about this article.
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